Pragmaticism

Life—
A dance of light and
shadow

hoping for the best out of the
worst, always or
occasionally, even when the sun is
down and the moon, not up, yet,
on a bleak horizon;

It is a restive movement
one place to another
like a tramp

from one situation
into another, equally
hopeless

one freight train onto
another
one burnt-out city into
another—Ukraine is just a name.

Trying to catch a smile from
a child
being deported to a treeless camp
with guarded gates

or,
at worst, trying to pluck a lonesome
rose
in the rubble and dust of
a block
of the

bombed-out homes,
with ugly, gaping
wounds.

Sunil Sharma is Toronto-based senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 23 published books: Seven collections of poetry; four of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, nine joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. He is a recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award---2012. His poems were published in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, in the year 2015. Sunil edits the English section of the monthly bilingual journal Setu published from Pittsburgh, USA. For more details, please visit here Read other articles by Sunil, or visit Sunil's website.